Tips & Tricks

Scouting your opposition

Knowing what your judo opponent wants to do has obvious as well as huge benefits. This type of video analysis requires you to have access to your opponent’s matches on video. When the two judoka have a history you can very quickly pull up all matches that have occurred on Athlete Analyzer Judo (or if someone else of your students that use AAJ have met the opponent before). If not, you can watch matches that are available from the judobase.org or judoinside.com if your opponent competes internationally, or on any other Youtube channel available.

It is very important to know if your opponent is right or left handed. As well all matches that you watch should be against athletes that are the same side as your opponent. If the matches you watch of your opponent are against left handed fighters and your students is a right-handed fighter then you are not going to have a lot of relevant information to go on.

PATTERN: a discernible regularity in the world or in a manmade design. As such, the elements of a pattern repeat in a predictable manner.

What is your opponent’s favorite technique? Not only do we want to know which throw they use the most and are the most successful with. But also, the important details that precede the attack. The grip that your opponent attacks from. Which grip his opponent has when he attacks, and what type of movement does he force his opponent to make before attempt his technique.

Every athlete has tendencies. Finding those to prevent against their strongest attack as well recognizing opportunities to use your best techniques can quite easily be the different between winning and losing a match. Once the tendencies are found you want to create a game plan to either prevent their actions, or counter them.

Finally and maybe most importantly you have to drill the game plan in the dojo. Have another student assist, the closer their behavior matches that of the opponent the better. It will be very difficult for an athlete to perform the game plan in a tournament if they only talked about it in the dojo. The game plan must be drilled.

I have found this has helped my students not only against the specific athlete we are preparing for but in all athletes that fight in a similar manner.

As athletes fight in specific patterns, like minded athletes do as well.

Book a personal demonstration of Athlete Analyzer Judo

If you would like to have a personal one to one demonstration of AAJ just click on one of the links below and pick a time slot.

Correcting errors made in competition

Previously, we looked at reinforcing previously applied skills. For part 2 we are going to look at correcting errors made in competition. This method is one that you have to be a little more careful with, as too many examples of your athlete making a mistake is likely to harm their confidence.

Remember: We don’t want to get too hung up on what they did wrong: we want to focus on what to do right going forward.

Once the problem has been pointed out, the next thing to do is to find the solution, and then train that solution repeatedly. You don’t break habits by just looking at the problem, but rather, by creating a new habit through practice.

Tip: Create a new coaching habit for yourself

Another practice that I have found helpful is to book a period of time every week to review a couple of your athletes’ matches. This weekly coaching habit keeps you in the practice of reviewing matches, and there are always little details you can find to improve upon. Allowing some time to go by after a tournament will take all emotion out of your review process, allowing you to be more objective, and thus do a better job.

As you review more matches by more of your athletes, you may even find patterns of mistakes made by your athletes. The necessary corrections can then be implemented on a large scale.

Reflect on this: Reviewing your athletes is in fact a form of self-assessment. Keep on top of your own coaching skills as part of your regular weekly routine.

Book a personal demonstration

If you would like to have a personal one to one demonstration of AAJ just click on one of the links below and pick a time slot.

Why public pages?

There are many benefits to display your public pages in Athlete Analyzer Judo. Public pages are for judokas, teams, coaches and most of all – your fans and supporters.

The public pages works similar for everyone. Set it up once and let the system update your careers automatically. Here’s a short breakdown of the features and benefits with Athlete Analyzer Judo Public pages.

Public pages for athletes

Write a short story about yourself, your goals and what motivates you to take your judo to the next level. Add a nice profile picture and optional some great action photos on the tatamis. If you have any sponsors make sure to add their logos and links to their website. Next step is to add your other channels you may have as Facebook, Instagram, JudoInside, Judobase and so on. You can choose which of your coaches you want to be displayed giving them a little attention as well.

You can also add a Paypal “Donate button” making it possible for fans to contribute so you can focus even more on your quest to be number one. PayPal takes a small transaction fee but the rest is yours – we know how hard it could be to finance a judo career.

Every time you add a new competition the result will be updated on your public page without any additional work which makes your pages always up to date. It’s easy to share your page on social media giving more attention to you and of course your sponsors. This makes it real easy to have your fans and sponsors updated without any additional work from your side. Yes, you know why – so you can focus even more on your quest to be number one without leaving your fans behind.

Public pages for teams

The public pages for teams works about the same as for athletes. Add some information about your great organisation and your logo,some nice pictures, social networks and your sponsors. You can add a PayPal Donate button making it possible for your team to get some well needed additional funding’s.

Every athlete’s results will be displayed on your team map automatically. See your the results from your team spread out over the world and make sure to spread the word by sharing your page frequently.

Public pages for coaches

This is a new one – public pages for coaches. Why’s that? Well, many coaches do an awesome work putting down their skills and often a lot of their time helping their athletes to achieve their goals. We think it could be a nice thing to put them in the spotlight as well! How it works? To put it simply – quite similar as for the team pages. All your athlete’s results will be added automatically and you will soon be amazed over how many results there will be. You can even add your own PayPal Donate button and who knows, maybe get some funding for that coffee between your athlete’s contests? 😉

Well, that’s the main functionality of the profile pages. The focus for us have been to make it as easy as possible to create as much attention and impact for our beloved sport Judo in general and your career in particular. We hope that you will love it and make sure to share your pages as much as possible and remember – sharing is caring 🙂

To analyze your judo you’ll of course need some data to analyze. All analysis charts displays data from tagged match events from your uploaded match videos so there’s no way around to upload your videos. Over time your tagged match events will provide a great resource in order to analyze your judo in various ways.

Upload your judo videos

The easiest way to get your match videos to our server is to let a friend record your matches from your smartphone and then upload the videos using the app. Just beware that your videos can be large so make sure to use a wifi connection if you don’t have a lot of mobile data. You can also of course upload your judo matches from a computer if you prefer that. Just make sure your computer don’t enter energy save during the upload process as it might interrupt the upload.

Video size

Sometimes your friends will continue to record the match after soremade which often is quite unnecessary, at least for analyzing purposes. In order to keep down the size of your videos there’s a lot of time saving to gain if you just end the recording after soremade. Another tip is to win your matches quick which will result in small and neat video sizes 😉

Some users pause the recording during mate to save video size. This is not recommended because we’ll soon add new charts for analyzing the time during your active and passive periods in your matches. Sometimes if there’s a long break due to injury or the referees having a long discussion or something else you might have to pause but otherwise, keep recording.

You can also experiment which resolution you record your videos in. A high resolution will of course result in a large video size. We recommend that you use 720p resolution which is sufficient in most cases.

Monitoring the training load of athletes in training and competition is a very hot topic in coaching science right now. With this trend, and with the speed in which new technologies such as ‘wearables’ are being developed it is important we understand the why and the how to measure and optimize these important markers.

Firstly, the why? Research had proven that monitoring training load effectively can help the coach in deciding when to push the athlete harder, and perhaps more importantly when to reign it back (Bourdon et al, 2017). The practice of effective monitoring of training load, allows the coach to make evidence informed decisions. This can significantly decrease the rate of injury and illness. ultimately leading to improved performance through a reduction of ‘lost’ training days throughout the year.

As well as reducing injury and illness occurrences, monitoring training load builds our knowledge on how the athlete’s respond and adapt to the stimulus of training, helps inform the design of future training programs and by individualising the training based on monitoring results, can enhance performance.

Next the how? There are many ways to monitor training load, these can be grouped in two way. Internal load such as blood lactate, heart rate, and rate of perceived exertion (RPE). External load is more objective, such as weight lifted, power output, time-motion analysis and many more. A great monitoring system integrates both elements to provide insight into the status of the athlete.

The two measures we use in conjunction are: Session duration(in minutes), usually this excludes the warm-up and focuses on the specific content of the session, however I prefer to include this time in the total duration figure because we focus the warm-up on developing gymnastic ability, mobility, and general motor performance which ultimately leads to improved performance. Rate of perceived exertion (RPE) refers to how intense the athlete felt the session was (on a scale of 0-10), and by multiplying both numbers together we get the training load(TL) for that session. For example a technical based session may be 120 minutes, with a RPE of 3, which equates to TL = 360. Opposed to a shorter, more intense randori session of 60 mins, at a RPE of 9 TL = 540

In practice this is simple, the coach sets the duration and intensity (RPE) of a session during their planning, and then the athlete enters the data based on their actual training load completed after the training session has taken place (often sooner rather than later). For example, a randori session may be planned for 90 minute and look something like this: –

Once the session is completed, the athlete enters the duration of the session (they may not complete the whole session due to injury, tapering or another reason), followed by their rating of how hard the session was. With the athletes I work with we use the Lego scale (to make it more interesting and give them some context to the numbers). There are lots of resources like this around that give a practical sense of how to use RPE, and by adding descriptions to the rating, it usually makes it easier for the athlete to accurately gauge how hard the session was. Typically we find technical sessions score 4-5 on effort, and randori comes in much higher from 8-10 varying depending on if we are training at home, on a training camp or in a completion phase.

Give access to your plans to the other coaches. Several coaches in your team can help build the same plan. One can plan all the judo training, another all the strength and conditioning and a third all competitions and camps.

Use week planning. Individual training sessions can often be planned on a week level instead of a day level. Doing so means that you no longer have keep track of your athletes’ weakly schedule and the athletes can plan their week according to their own schedule.

No need to plan everything at once. Athlete Analyzer is built for continual planning and any changes you make to a plan will become available for every follower instantaneously. Plan a only few weeks ahead and then continuously add training sessions by time.

Individual planning. Don’t create training plans for single athletes. Instead go directly to their calendar and plan their training. This saves time for both you and the athlete.

We have recently released “Structured goals” in Athlete Analyzer enabling coaches and athletes to set goals based on their analysis from training and competitions. Having clear goals are highly motivating and also help coaches to collaborate for the benefit for their athletes.

With Athlete Analyzer it’s very easy to analyze an athlete’s scoring in Nage Waza and see their patterns regarding every aspect like throwing directions, kumi kata and much more. The data comes from the tagging of match events in the match videos done by the athletes.

It’s possible to create goals on every aspect regarding scoring in Nage Waza but in this example we can see that the athlete lacks throws at the direction North West and want to set a new goal for increase throws in that direction

We create a fairly straightforward goal of more (3 during the period) Osoto gari at North West using a right neck grip:

The judoka will now have this new goal:

All coaches with a relation with the athlete can see the goal and can focus the technical training for the athlete on Osoto gari in the dojo.

When the athlete has managed to throw with Osoto gari at North East in a competition the goal starts to be fulfilled:

When the athlete reach the goal the athlete will receive a badge and all coaches around the athlete will get a notification. This makes it very easy to collaborate between the athlete and all his/her coaches.

“Structured goals” in Athlete Analyzer gives you the possibility to set very detailed complex goals regarding Nage Waza, Ne Waza, Competition results, training and other more general goals.

Leaderboards are an easy way to keep track of key indicators for your judokas and are displayed in the coach dashboard. Athlete Analyzer Judo keep track over how many contests each judoka has done, their Ippon rate and much more automatically.

Tip: Be sure to create homogenous groups with your judokas. You can for example create one group of your cadets, one another group for your juniors and so on. You can also divide the groups further with female cadets, male cadets and so on to make each group more comparable. Each judoka can be a member of several groups.